ONE of downtown’s most interesting properties is about to hit the sale market: 17 State St., the 42-story, 570,000 square foot office tower with a unique curved glass façade overlooking Battery Park and New York harbor.
Cushman & Wakefield’s Capital Markets group – the Awesome Foursome of Richard Baxter, Jon Caplan, Ron Cohen and Scott Latham – will be sifting offers for the tower’s current owner, RFR Realty.
It will be a test of the downtown investment-sale market in these early days of 2008.
The tower, opened in 1988, is mostly leased to such firms as AXA Reinsurance and Shareholder Communications Corp. The Cushman & Wakefield offering says its 14,000 square foot floors with sensational views will appeal especially to hedge funds, money management firms and Internet companies.
RFR’s Web site currently lists little available space, including one 20th floor suite with an asking rent of $45 per square foot.
*
Our Upper West Side friends can stop e-mailing us speculation that something’s wrong with the residential construction project at 2075 Broadway. The development has always been fully financed, and a short-term pause in work at the southwest corner of Broadway and 72nd Street is over.
As we reported last month, the $200 million joint venture of Philip Pilevsky, Rhodes NY and the Gotham Organization was temporarily stalled by Buildings Dept. permit revocations and a stop-work order.
The developers have since obtained new permits and excavation and foundation work is again under way. The 19-story building will have 196 luxury rental apartments and 48,000 square feet of retail space.
*
Athletic-wear maker Converse, a Nike subsidiary, is boosting its office presence at 28 W. 23rd St., the mid-block office/retail building owned by GVA Williams principals Andrew Roos and Michael Cohen.
Converse first took 23,200 square feet a few years ago at the address, which is linked to 40 W. 23rd next door. Now, Roos said, it’s extended that lease for 10 more years, doubled its space by leasing another full floor and taken an option on a third floor – “which they’ll probably exercise and bring their total to 70,000 square feet,” he said.
Roos declined to discuss the rent and the other brokers couldn’t be reached over the holiday weekend. But a neighborhood source said Converse would pay “around” $50 a square foot.
The buildings at 28 and 40 W. 23rd St., comprising around 500,000 square feet, are best known for the 100,000 square-foot Home Depot store. But the largest tenant is designer Marc Ecko Enterprises, which makes its office headquarters there with 250,000 feet.
Meanwhile, architects Perkins & Eastman added 8,400 square feet to its existing offices at another building owned by Roos and his partners, 1140 Broadway at 26th Street. Sources estimated the rent at close to $45 a square foot. Roos and Michael Joseph brokered the deal for the landlord and GVA Williams’ Ted Rotante repped the tenant.
*
The final piece of the retail puzzle has been filled at Taconic Investment Partners’ 401 W. 14th St. in the Meatpacking District. Italian fashion designer Moschino has signed a lease for its first freestanding Manhattan boutique there, with 2,700 square feet tucked between the new, tri-level Apple store at the Ninth Avenue corner and Hugo Boss’s store to the west.
Terms were not disclosed, but my colleague Lois Weiss previously reported the asking rent on Moschino’s space was $500 a square foot. The store will open this spring. Until now, Moschino has sold its collections through stores such as Bergdorf Goodman and Barneys.
Taconic has virtually filled the 62,000 square- foot building it bought for $34.5 million in 2005 and dramatically restored. As we recently re ported, Paul Tudor Jones’ Tudor In vestment Corp. took the 9,100 squa re-foot penthouse – confirming the once rough neighborhood’s transition from edgy to hedgy.
Taconic was represented by Robert K. Futterman’s Karen Bellantoni and Aegis Realty’s Seth Miller repped Moschino.